#open democracy

[elladastinkardiamou]

Press freedom in Greece is under pressure – from the government and itself

On Saturday 20 March, Kostas Vaxevanis, publisher of the Athens-based newspaper Documento, tweeted that an arrest warrant had been issued against him. His newspaper had published the full text of a lawsuit lodged against him personally by 22 police officers, with their names on its front page. The policemen were under investigation for the torture of a young activist.

Vaxevanis was not arrested, but the event was an alert to the journalist community of Athens. Documento and Efimerida Syntakton (a cooperatively run newspaper not controlled by the mainstream media conglomerates that are almost unanimously in favour of Greece’s conservative government) have been reporting the stories of victims of police harassment and abuse.

Earlier, on 9 March, clashes had erupted between the police and some of the 5,000 protesters who had gathered in the middle-class Athens suburb of Nea Smyrni to demonstrate against police brutality during the coronavirus quarantine. The protest was prompted by a recent event in the neighbourhood, when a rapid response squad out on COVID-curfew patrol harassed a family and then attacked a young man who stepped in to argue in their defence.

Three policemen were injured and one was hospitalised. The police arrested about 30 protesters, some of whom said they were mistreated and even tortured in police custody. Aris Papazaharoudakis, a 21-year-old student and activist, was ‘kidnapped’ the next day by masked men and taken to police headquarters where he was subjected to torture, according to the two newspapers.

Twitter and Facebook were flooded with mobile phone videos of the protest, depicting numerous incidents of police brutality. The mainstream media failed to represent the events impartially or accurately. National TV stations focused on the attack against the police officer, but almost completely ignored the reported cases of police violence.

On at least two occasions, news channels repeated fake stories circulated by the police without checking them, and also added incorrect subtitles to a video, falsifying the meaning of the event. The video presented the head of the rapid response squad telling his men: “let’s go kill them” [protesters], which was subtitled as “they will kill him” [a police officer].

[ailedhoo]

Journalist and author George Monbiot on the task of replacing neoliberalism, reinvigorating democracy and averting climate breakdown.

This is a interesting Open Democracy video, especially on highlighting the importance of the narrative when it comes to politics, especially on noting how the Commons has been neglected by contemporary political theory.

We need to rebuild a politics of belonging from the bottom up. George Monbiot also in this looks at how to make democracy more representative, looking at cases like the experiment of democratic confederalism in Kurdistan. 

George Monbiot also looks at climate breakdown and the need to bring democratic ways to the international scale in contrast to the rather oligarchic, undemocratic & dysfunctional system held by organisations such as the UN Security Council and the World Trade Organisation. We will need democratic shifts to counter the climate breakdown.

[profeminist]

Source

Don the Con, F*ck Off

[elladastinkardiamou]

The remnants of Golden Dawn are winning support in Cyprus

With former MPs and members of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn currently behind bars, it is easy to forget that the group’s offshoot in Cyprus has been growing steadily for the past ten years.

The ultra-nationalist, far-Right National Popular Front (Ethniko Laiko Metopo, ELAM) was founded in 2008 by Christos Christou, who served for many years at the side of Nicos Michaloliakos, the now imprisoned head of Golden Dawn. Now, with parliamentary elections scheduled for May, a large question mark looms over the future of the extreme Right in Cyprus. With the island mired in an ongoing pandemic, accusations of government corruption and protracted divisions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, how will ELAM fare?

ELAM officially registered as a political party in 2011, after it had unsuccessfully attempted to be recognised as ‘Golden Dawn, Cyprus Branch’ in 2008. Initially, ELAM flew under the radar and was only known for its members’ violent street attacks against migrants and minorities.

After the controversial Eurogroup bailout deal for Cyprus’s banks in 2013 and a period of austerity measures, ELAM saw its ratings rise. From winning 0.88% of the vote in 2013, it reached 2.69% in the 2014 European Parliament elections and in 2016, with 3.71%, finally succeeded in sending two MPs to the Cyprus parliament.

The most recent presidential elections, in 2018, continued the steady increase in ELAM’s appeal. Its leader Christos Christou won 5.65% of the vote, which was the fourth highest share (though significantly below the first three contenders). Part of the reason for this success was the party’s targeted charity campaigns in a context of increasing poverty and dissatisfaction with European politics. Donations of food and clothing followed the Golden Dawn model by helping Greeks only and blaming migrants for the country’s socio-economic decline. But where does ELAM stand today, a year after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic?

[elladastinkardiamou]

November 17: youth uprisings in Greece then and now

Article from 2019

In November 1973, thousands of Greek students occupied one of the largest universities of Athens, the National Polytechnic, demanding the end of the military dictatorship which had started in 1967. The voice of the young students, “the free, fighting Greeks” as the DIY radio station of the occupation repeatedly called them, a voice that is still in the memory of every European democrat following politics at the time, was silenced in the early hours of November 17 when a tank from the military junta crashed through the gates of the university.

The official number of casualties that night was 24. Yet despite the suppression of the uprising, the arrests, the persecutions and the tortures that followed, the junta ended a few months later in July 1974. With the transition to democracy, November 17 is commemorated as a reminder of these struggles.

Fast-forward 45 years later to November 11, 2019 – 200 young Greeks facing the formidable Greek riot police inside the Economic University of Athens are chanting “the dictatorship didn’t end in ‘73”. A huge mobilization follows, with demonstrations and the occupation of over 20 university departments all over Greece, signalling the revival of a student movement which had subsided under the previous government, despite the externally-imposed austerity and the economic hardships of the country in previous years.

University asylum What prompted this cycle of occupations is the violation of “university asylum”, the legal protection of freedom of expression within universities that has been in place since 1982. Contrary to a wave of misinformation by the current government, police intervention in cases of criminal activity is still possible even with the asylum legislation, though only after the expressed permission of the university authorities.

Their excuse for shutting down the Economic University for a week in November was based on a search in the University, thought to be the base of anarchist groups, which revealed nothing more than a few empty bottles and motorbike helmets stashed in some basement. The reality is that Greece’s new government fears a revival of the student movement.

[elladastinkardiamou]

Golden Dawn is defeated: the damage to democracy is harder to repair

In late November 2010, returning to work after lunch, I noticed a small crowd protesting in Platia Vathis, a run-down square in central Athens. As I came close, I saw Greek flags and banners reading “we want our neighbourhood back” and “no to the islamisation of Greece”; but I also noticed that the thin crowd of locals that chanted feebly in the middle of the square was surrounded by beefy men with shaved heads, standing at regular intervals and facing out towards onlookers.

This was Golden Dawn spreading its hateful gospel in the streets of Athens, barely a couple of weeks after its performance in municipal elections had secured a seat in the Athens City Council for its leader, Nikos Michaloliakos. Protests organised in a similar pattern that had been going on for over a year intensified.

Committees of “indignant residents” were organised, with Golden Dawn members posing as locals supposedly threatened by uncontrolled immigration. Golden Dawn thugs occupied central squares and declared them “immigrant-free”, chasing down and abusing immigrants and busting up their shops.

In May 2011, they orchestrated a three-day anti-immigrant pogrom, which resulted in the murder of 21-year-old Alim Abdul Manan, a Bangladeshi immigrant, as well as over 100 incidents of physical assault. A few months previously, Michaloliakos had stormed out of a City Council meeting, unabashedly giving the Nazi salute on camera, a gesture that epitomised the neo-Nazi’s arrival in mainstream politics.

[elladastinkardiamou]

The administration of orders: an analogy of madness and migration on Leros

A photo essay.by Jacob Thurn

Towering behind the refugee camp on the Greek island of Leros stands the ruin of an abandoned mental asylum. It has been dismantled after scandalous reports of the treatment of inmates in the late 1980s and early1990s. Historical revision of the facilities’ function and purpose reveals a striking symbolism of the recurrent pathologies of society’s impulse to contain and isolate what is conceived as a threat to its orderly function.

In 1994 the photographer Alex Majoli published his first major body of work entitled “Leros”. The monograph documents the final years of the mental asylum on the island. The Goyaesque images depict the gruesome conditions the outcasts were kept in, left largely to themselves with minimal supervision by adequately trained staff and guarded by island inhabitants with no formal training in psychiatric care at all. The cover of the book reads:

"All I know about Leros is in this book. I know that this is another story about crazy people, many crazy people, more than 4,000 at first. I know that 'Leros' means dirty and that they came to this island from all over Greece, chosen from among the worst cases, the ones they'd given up on in the psychiatric hospitals. I know that they were housed in an ex-military base on the island, which had previously been used as a jail for all political prisoners. I know that the islanders began working in the new psychiatric hospital. I know that soon Leros' story began to be associated with its psychiatric hospital and that the world knew nothing about it. I know that inside the asylum you didn't live, you survived.”

For the larger part of 2018, I went to work with a small NGO on Leros which tried to address aspects of the unfolding humanitarian crisis on the islands with growing numbers of asylum seekers landing on their shores. When I arrived on Leros, I did not really know anything about the island. I knew it was a small island in the Aegean sea, close to Turkey. I knew that the island served as one of five ‘EU hotspots’ or centres of first reception and identification for asylum seekers crossing the Turkish-European border by boat. I knew that the official objective of the hotspots was to speed up the registration and asylum claim procedures. I also knew that with Turkey being considered a safe third country, there was little chance of being granted asylum in the first instance.

[elladastinkardiamou]

Paola Revenioti: an LGBTIQ icon in the Greek elections

Paola Revenioti – a Greek LGBTIQ rights icon standing in this weekend’s parliamentary elections – stepped out onto Syggrou Avenue for the first time when she was 16 years old. It was the mid-1970s, just after the fall of the junta that had ruled the country since 1967. Syggrou Avenue, which runs from the centre of Athens to the sea, was known as a main street for sex workers.

“It was amazing”, the transgender artist, activist and now 61-year-old MP candidate, recalls. “All of a sudden, people worshipped me – often the same people that would ridicule me, and shout “faggot!” at me during the day. Don’t get me wrong, things were rough. There were knives and things... But I could be myself. And I could survive”.

Survive she did. Over the years, Revenioti has campaigned tirelessly for human rights. In the 1980s she published a magazine of “revolutionary homosexual expression”. In the 1990s, she organised Greece’s first Pride festivals. This weekend, she’s on the ballot of MERA25, the Greek party of the DiEM25 European movement founded by ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

But it hasn’t been easy; she’s also been arrested more times than she can count. Revenioti met us recently, at a café opposite Athens’ central train station, and talked to us about the journey she’s been on, and the significance of her parliamentary candidacy.

This neighbourhood has a local reputation for petty crime, homelessness and drug use. But Revenioti, who lives nearby, points out that it is also rich in culture – with immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. “It’s one of the areas where you realise”, she says, “that Athens is now a multicultural metropolis, where we all have to learn to live together.”